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Looking AheadTis book has focused on three issues—the allocation of resources, thedistribution of income, and the scale of the economy relative totheecosystem—with special emphasis on the third. A good allocation ofresources is efficient; a good distribution of income or wealth is just; agood scale is at least ecologically sustainable.Allocation and distribution are familiar concepts from standard economics:for any given distribution of income, there is a different optimalallocation of resources with its corresponding optimal set of prices. Standardeconomics focuses primarily on the allocation issue, paying secondaryattention to distribution, first because a given distribution is logicallynecessary for defining efficient allocation, and second because distributivefairness is important in its own right.The third issue of scale, the physical size of the economy relative to thecontaining ecosystem, is not recognized in standard economics and hastherefore become the differentiating focus of ecological economics. Thepreanalytic vision of the economy as an open subsystem of a larger ecosystemthat is finite, nongrowing, and materially closed (though open with respectto solar energy) immediately suggests three analytical questions: Howlarge is the economic subsystem relative to the containing ecosystem? Howlarge can it be? How large should it be? Is there an optimal scale beyondwhich physical growth in the economic subsystem begins to cost more atthe margin than it is worth in terms of human welfare? This text has triedto explain the reasons for an affirmative answer to this last question.If the economy grew into the void, it would encroach on nothing, andits growth would have no opportunity cost. But since the economy in factgrows into and encroaches upon the finite and nongrowing ecosystem,there is an opportunity cost to growth in scale, as well as a benefit. Thecostsarise from the fact that the physical economy, like an animal, is a“dissipative structure” sustained by a metabolic flow from and back to theenvironment. This flow, which we have called throughput (adopting theterm from engineers) begins with the depletion of low-entropy useful resourcesfrom the environment, is followed by the processes of productionand consumption (which, despite the connotations of the words, are onlyphysical transformations), and ends with the return of an equal quantityof high-entropy polluting wastes.Depletion and pollution are costs. Not only does the growing economyencroach spatially and quantitatively on the ecosystem, it also qualitativelydegrades the environmental sources and sinks of the metabolic throughout477